That Mockingbird Don't Sing
by Missie2
Summary: Warhawk is hard to get a hold of at the best of times, but where does he go when noone sees him for days on end? What happened to his family was tragic, but...


That Mockingbird Don't Sing

I know I shouldn't be starting a new story given all my unfinished stuff. But I played around with this idea for a while and I want to get a reaction to it. Be warned, it's quite dark, there's character death and some upsetting scenarios in it. But bear in mind I based this on real life cases. I don't own Justice League.

Depending on how this is received, I may continue it as an arc.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Rex Stewart woke up late on Tuesday morning, which was alarming since he only had a short pocket of time before he had to move on again. Scrunching up his eyelids against the dim light of his small hotel room, he grudgingly pulled himself out of the lumpy, uncomfortable bed. A quick glance at the full-length mirror told him he was dishevelled-looking but in an attractive way.

After a quick shower he pulled on a plain black turtleneck and dark blue jeans, and smoked two Camel cigarettes. He only smoked on days like this, the nicotine calmed his nerves. He'd always been jittery, except in the midst of battle. In a fight he was perfectly calm and collected. His father said he was like his mother that way. Rex winced as he thought of his mother, and then again when he thought about his father.

It was an oddly primal feeling, the love he felt for his parents. He could go days without thinking of either of them and could watch happy families play with their children without feeling anything at all. Some might have said he held little affection for either of them, but that wasn't the case. His memories were evoked by strange, abstract things; the sight of a crow chasing other birds from its nest, the smell of cut grass and stale coffee, burnt food, certain shades of green. He could be just fine for an entire day and then by chance he'd come across a feather lying in a clump of dirt or an empty bottle of gin and he would break down all over again.

Sighing, he finished his cigarette and left the hotel room. The day was sunny and the streets crowded with people but many stepped out of his way. He was a big guy and the look on his face suggested he took shit from nobody. He made his way to the local park after picking up a cup of hot chocolate and a doughnut. Despite waking late, he was too early to go to the hospital. He sat for a while on a bench, sipping his drink but not eating the doughnut. He never felt hungry on days like this. He smoked a Camel instead.

Just as he was watching a couple of kids mess about on a jungle gym, the communicator in his jeans pocket went off. He scowled and switched it onto mute. He'd given the League strict instructions not to bother him.

While it was true that Warhawk was a valued member of the Justice League, the others often found it hard to get hold of him. He was often likened to Batman, very private, very quiet and apt to disappear when the mood struck him. No-one could blame him though. Although there were several League families destroyed in the line of duty (the most recently notable being Huntress' son, fatherless at the age of seven when The Question was killed in the line of duty) there was no case quite so horrific than that of the Stewarts. Maybe it was the way Shayera had died, or the circumstances leading up to her death, or John's mental disintegration afterwards and his subsequent estrangement from his son that made the case so notorious. Or maybe it was the other factor in the story, the one only a few people could even bear to mention.

Chloe.

Finishing his cigarette, Rex stalked out of the park with deliberate, almost stomping, steps. His mood was beginning to turn black and he hated when that happened. The League could take care of themselves; he had much more important things to worry about. After a solid half-hour of walking, his mood eased and the hospital loomed into view. It was quiet inside and he found the room and the doctor he was looking for easily.

Dr. Hegrun was a small stout man, completely dwarfed by Rex but nevertheless he greeted him in a way that was almost fatherly. It was incongruous to the grisly task he had to perform, but Rex relaxed around him.

"You sure you wanna do this, son?" the doctor asked, scrunching up his nose a little at the smell of cigarette smoke.

"Yes. I do," Rex replied automatically. Over the last two years he'd been asked that same question so many times he barely thought about it any more.

"A'right," said the doctor, stroking his bushy white beard. The young man wasn't much of a talker, unusual for a twenty year old. He had a son that just turned twenty-one and that boy never shut the hell up. The two men walked down the long white corridor towards the morgue.

"You very lucky you got here now, son. I reckon in another day or two you wouldn't recognise these two," said the doctor, unlocking the door to the morgue.

"Why?" asked Rex.

"We do a lot of stem cell research here. The claim date on these has been up for about a year now, but we only got around to them last week. I was about to schedule procedures for them when Doctor Kaysen called and told me about you. She the doctor helping you out here?"

"Yes," Rex answered. "She's been a big help to me."

"She a good doctor," Hegrun agreed, "give you the clothes off her back if you needed 'em. But I reckon she should spend a little less time in the hospital and a little more time out on the town, know what I mean?" He was rifling through some files now as they entered the morgue. It was so cold inside that it nearly sucked the breath out of Rex's body.

"In my day, if a woman wasn't married by the time she was thirty she was an old maid. Not like today. All these ladies going out and working till they too old to have children, then they panic and try to turn back the clock. But clocks don't go backwards, they go forwards. That's why they clocks."

Rex nodded in agreement, though he was actually only half listening. His eyes were on the rows of numbered drawers all along the wall.

"I blame that Sex and the City show. Making ladies think they can have everything whenever they want. Nobody can have everything, especially when they want it. You got a special lady, Mr. Stewart?"

That last question caught Rex by surprise. "No," he answered simply.

"Well you best find yourself one. That old maid rule works the other way too. Don't believe anyone that say it don't." With that, the doctor strolled over to a shelf, the second from the bottom on the far left. He pulled it out of the wall and it made a sound like a train rolling over rusty tracks.

"I need you to sign this before we go any further, son," Hegrun said, holding out a white form. Rex scribbled his name down quickly and handed it back. Then the doctor pulled the stark white sheet away from the slab.

There were two babies, each very different but undeniably newborns. The one on the left was plump, healthy looking. Her two little fists were held up near her mouth as though she might wake up and suck her thumb at any moment. Her mouth was slightly open though no breath issued from it, her eyelashes fluttered gently as though she was dreaming, but it was because there was a draught in the room. She was perfect, and very much dead.

The one on the right was a pathetic sight. As female as the baby she shared a slab with, she was a very different creature. Her arms were stunted, her legs twisted in an odd direction. Her wide blue eyes weren't covered by eyelids. Her mouth was covered by a thin layer of skin. She was half the size of her slab sister. Rex wondered if Thanagarian DNA was the reason she was so malformed, or if it was just an accidental aberration that had occurred in the womb. He wondered if he turned the babies over would he find a trace of wing development on either one.

"You okay son?" asked the doctor.

"Yes. I'm fine," he mumbled, not looking away from the babies. He'd been in this position before, and if this time didn't produce the result he wanted he knew he'd be in that position again and again.

"Right. Let's get down to business." He took a small instrument from his pocket and held it up to Rex's neck. A tiny needle, barely noticeable to the human eye, pierced Rex's neck and withdrew within a second. He performed the same action on the two babies with different needles.

"The results will be ready in about an hour, son," he said, scribbling in various blanks on the form.

"Mind if I stay here with them?" Rex whispered.

"Sure thing. I just hope you won't be disappointed when the results come back." The doctor left the morgue then, leaving Rex alone with the babies.

Rex traced the outline of the first baby's nose and eyes, wondering if she would have grown up to look like her parents. He did likewise to the other. He turned them both over slightly to check for an extra bone on the back, and found nothing. In his mind's eye he dissected their features and compared them to his. The baby on the left had a similar mouth to his, and big eyes. The one on the right had a wide nose that looked familiar. Then again, they were just babies. Who could be sure what they'd look like if they'd grown up? He was the most calm he'd been in days; being in the presence of the deceased often did that to him. He allowed his mind to stray back to thoughts of his mother, his father, and Chloe.

…………

Rex Stewart was born two months premature after an emergency Caesarean section that nearly killed both him and his mother. Apparently Shayera's womb was too small to accommodate a full-sized human baby. The news that came nine years later, that she was pregnant again, was greeted with both joy and trepidation. The family moved to a remote area in rural Wisconsin so she could suffer through her pregnancy without worrying about being seen by the general public.

And suffer she did. Rex had seen her come home from missions with broken bones, lacerations, even carried in the door unconscious by his Dad after one too many blows to the head but nothing seemed to hurt her so much as her massively swollen stomach. In the space of seven months Shayera changed from a loud, fierce, intimidating woman into a pale shadow who barely had enough energy to move around her own house. During this time John spent more and more time in outer space and less time in his own house with his wife and child. Although he was ten years old, Rex understood that the dynamic in the house had changed. He understood that his mother was in too much pain to be intimate with his father. He understood that although John didn't blame her, a man had needs. They were being fulfilled somewhere else. His absence and Rex's school hours meant there was time for Ardelia Brannigan to step in.

Rex didn't like Ardelia, who was morbidly obese and constantly smelled of sweat and sour milk. John didn't like her either, because she interfered with the running of his household. Even Shayera didn't like her. But Ardelia was their only neighbour; Shayera needed someone to talk to occasionally even if the person was deeply unpleasant. And once she was in her eighth month she wasn't able to cook (anything raw made her sick) so Ardelia, who always brought food over, was useful to have around. In the middle of this month, the family found out that the baby was a girl and started picking out names. The settled on Chloe, because it was similar to a Thanangarian name but still terrestrial. Rex saved up his pocket money and bought Chloe a pretty rag doll to welcome her to the family. As Chloe's due date approached, Rex went on a camping trip with the school. John assured him that he'd be back in time to welcome his baby sister into the world. John himself was going away for three days to a distant planet. Shayera knew he wasn't going alone, but she said nothing.

Just a week before Chloe was due to enter the world, Batman intercepted a distress signal. When he opened the line of communication and asked about the situation, there was no answer. Concerned, he traced the signal to John and Shayera's house and made his way down there. What he encountered there was second only to his parent's murder in how much it traumatised him. Ten years later it still gave him nightmares.

The front door of the house was wide open, and the doorknob was bloody. There were splashes of blood here and there that got bigger as he approached the kitchen. The kitchen itself was like the inside of a slaughterhouse.

He found Shayera in a corner, leaning up against the fridge and, amazingly, still alive. There were two gaping wounds on her head and blood was trickling out of one ear. Her chest was a mess of stab wounds. Most shocking, however, was her stomach. She was actually holding her internal organs inside her with her hands. Her stomach had been sliced open. The baby she'd been carrying was gone.

Shayera was lucid enough to tell Bruce what had happened. Ardelia had arrived in the afternoon when Shayera was feeling particularly sore. Ardelia made her a cup of herbal tea which she had laced with ketamine, a powerful tranquilizer. Shayera felt drowsy but not as quickly as Ardelia would have liked, so she took matters into her own hands. She picked up a metal statue from the hall table and hit Shayera three times with it, the first two hitting her on the head, the third glancing her shoulder. The blows failed to knock Shayera out, but they did cause her to lose her balance. Ardelia wrestled her to the floor and grabbed her by the hair. She then slammed Shayera's head down on the tile floor several times.

Shayera fought back, and later it was found that she had inflicted injuries on the other woman that caused her to lose an eye. But the effects of the ketamine were taking hold and she was already considerably weakened by the pregnancy. She didn't black out exactly, but her body went numb and she stopped moving.

Ardelia grabbed a butcher knife from the cutlery drawer (having spent so much time in the Stewart house Ardelia knew where everything was) and half opened, half tore Shayera's blouse at the waist. Then she cut Shayera's stomach open and removed the baby. Shayera said she heard the baby cry. Chloe was still alive when she was removed from her mother.

Ardelia wrapped the baby up it a tea towel and was about to leave when Shayera recovered some strength and tried to stop her. Ardelia responded by stabbing her over twenty times until she let go. Then Ardelia left with the baby.

Shayera did black out properly after that. She woke up some time later and managed to drag herself along the kitchen floor to where she kept the Watchtower's communicator. She sent a frenzied distress signal and faded in and out of consciousness until help arrived. Bruce attempted to call for an ambulance, but Shayera wouldn't let him. She told him she was already as good as dead, and that he should find her daughter. She told him where Ardelia lived and sent him out to get her.

Bruce caught up with Ardelia, but the woman had no baby with her. Under interrogation, she said that the baby had been glowing. It was a freak baby.

"_It had all these marks all over it, and they was glowing! It was Satan's child!"_

Ardelia had disposed of the baby, but she couldn't say where. Bruce left her with the police and went back to the Stewart house, calling for assistance as he went. By the time he got back to the house, Shayera was dead.

Every member of the League who was available made their way to the area and searched for the baby. Nothing, not the baby, not the baby's little corpse, not even the bloody tea towel she was wrapped it was found. Then John finally returned from his excursion in deep space, and found out what happened. It was John that took his wife's body out of the house, wrapped up in a white sheet. The magic that was disguising her wings had faded out with the shock of the attack so they trailed along the ground.

The days following were muted with grief and shock. Chloe was never found. Wally West disappeared shortly after Shayera died. Everyone knew they'd been close and her death hit him hard, but he didn't even turn up at her funeral. Vixen left the League, consumed with guilt over the part she had played in this sad story. She'd been sleeping with John for months and the trip into outer space had been her idea. Nobody could forget how John had sleepwalked through the funeral looking like he was dead himself. Or how Rex had gone up to the coffin to say goodbye to his mother and saw how the bump that his little sister had been in was no longer there. Wonder Woman had carried him screaming out of the church.

John didn't leave the League. He stayed on, but he only took on the big missions. He drank too much and he rarely talked about Shayera. He never talked about Chloe.

Rex never stopped thinking about Chloe. He heard through whispered comments that Chloe had been alive when Ardelia left with her. At the tender age of ten he decided he would find her, dead or alive. At eighteen his search began properly and it took him all over the country. He went to any hospital where they had the bodies of newborn baby girls and ran DNA tests on them. He went to orphanages and care homes and tested abandoned little girls there. Along the way he found some cases that shocked and saddened him.

The League fought big villains, warlords and meta-humans, but the little villains often got away with their crimes. Who had smothered the baby girl in Illinois and dumped her outside the emergency room? Who had beaten that girl in Texas so badly she ended up severely mentally retarded? Who had left that quiet, dark eyed child in Missouri so traumatised that she was mute? None of those girls was his sister, but he still felt for them.

…………

The door of the morgue opened again, and Rex blinked, confused. Had it really been an hour? Time tended to get away from him when he was lost in his own thoughts. Hegrun was barking instructions to someone on a mobile phone.

"…boy he getting to damn big for his boots. I ain't made of money!" he grouched, then hung up.

"Doctor?" Rex wanted to know the results. He was half dreading it, half looking forward to it. If one of the babies was Chloe, it would be the end of his search. But he still wanted to think of her as being alive.

"Sorry, son. Neither one is a match."

Rex nodded, and turned back to look at them. On the slab, they looked so alone, so tiny, so fragile. They weren't his concern really, but he still didn't want to leave them there.

"What'll happen to these two?" he asked.

"Needn't worry about those little gals, son. I make sure all of them get treated right. I got three daughters and a son, Mr. Stewart. I'd like to think if one of them ended up somewhere I don't know about that they'd be treated proper. If no-one else comes to claim them in a year, they get a proper funeral and a decent burial."

Rex left the hospital and made his way back to the hotel room. He'd be back in Midway by tomorrow, but he'd never stop looking for Chloe until he found her. Smoking a Camel and staring at the ceiling that night, he mentally reached out for her.

"_Chloe, where are you?"_

……..

Thousands of miles away in a bedroom on the second floor of a small house, a ten year old girl woke up. She thought she'd heard something.


End file.
